Project Brief: Engineering a Bespoke Educational Platform
The Share Foundation approached Zebedee to solve a critical operational bottleneck on their Stepladder of Achievement, a legacy bespoke application developed over a decade ago to support young people in care build skills in numeracy and financial capability.
Steps 1 to 3 of this platform were entirely reliant on a legacy third-party provder. While this served its purpose well initially, 10 years later it presented several problems: it focused on testing the young person, rather than learning and generated high licensing fees with reactive maintenance costs. It also had vulnerabilities that allowed the users to manipulate their learning goals.
Not only this, the user experience was dated and lacked modern educational engagement – today’s young people expect intuitive, highly interactive digital experiences.
Zebedee was tasked with replacing the components of Steps 1, 2, and 3 of the platform completely, building custom educational and assessment capability directly into the existing Umbraco .NET application.
The catch? A hard, unmovable deployment deadline of the end of May 2026. Missing this date would incur substantial external licensing penalties for the charity. So… we had just 15 weeks to complete the project!
The Challenge
Balancing Strict Governance with an Intuitive UX
Beyond the tight timeframe, the true challenge lay in the UX (user experience) – ensuring that strict administrative controls and sequential lesson gating rules felt completely seamless yet still encouraging to the end user. Achieving this balance required robust backend engineering, relentless UX testing iterations, close collaboration with the client and a carefully staged deployment.
Eliminating System Manipulation
The legacy system was vulnerable to user manipulation. We had to build a custom logic engine to secure the data pipeline without disrupting genuine users.
Complex Usability Requirements
The interface had to be mobile-responsive for the 15 to 17 demographic, meet Level A accessibility compliance and support an auto-save state for young people accessing the platform in separate short sessions.
High-Stakes Deployment
Deploying the new architecture required putting the live site into a 4-day maintenance window, freezing administrative approvals, and completely migrating active user progress tracking from the old system without breaking downstream modules.
Our Approach
We provided complete administrative control within Umbraco for the first three steps of the application, giving The Share Foundation’s Life Skills team instant, continuous oversight of student progress, module duration, and system logs. By pairing this visibility with full admin privileges to edit, move, or update lessons and questions on the fly, we transitioned TSF away from restrictive third-party platforms and into an environment they completely own and control.
Lean Architecture, Rapid Execution
With an estimated timeframe of 3.5 months and no contingency and as a tight agile team of senior specialists, we were able to structure the project to bypass traditional, slow-moving resource heavy development phases.
By building a prototype directly into Umbraco, we eliminated the friction of static sign-offs and allowed stakeholders to interact with live data architectures from week one. This “code-first” approach cut out the traditional design-to-development translation phase, ensuring that every hour of the 3.5-month timeline was spent building production-ready features rather than conceptual documentation and detailed mock-ups.
Developing the Sequential Architecture
To turn a disjointed “test-only” system into an immersive learning application, we engineered several custom modules.
- A Bespoke Teaching Framework: Provided fully editable multi-format lessons with digital content resources such as text, image, audio, video, and PDFs, running seamlessly on a single screen for usability and to prevent users from distraction.
- User Dashboard & Progress: Designed intuitive visual indicators that clearly display step module completion, lesson progression, alongside automated percentage completion. This clear, visual road mapping allowed young people to instantly see how far they had progressed and exactly what steps remained to unlock their achievement.
- Dynamic Engine: Built a robust anti-cheating mechanism utilising randomised question pools with single and multi-choice fields, field-input validation and dynamic testing and answer display.
- Enforced Gatekeeping: Coded strict sequential rules requiring a pass threshold to unlock subsequent lessons and modules, ensuring absolute academic integrity.
The Outcomes
The overhauled Stepladder Plus digital platform was launched and finished on time, before the deadline. By moving the framework from an external model to a custom-built solution, Zebedee delivered an application that has a completely seamless UX for young people while providing huge operational advantages:
Significant Cost Rationalisation
Erased external third-party testing fees entirely by embedding testing components natively within the application code.
Total Data Autonomy
Secured the student pipeline using anonymised, numerical ID tracking within a secure environment to protect user privacy.
Future-Proofed Scalability
Built a foundation perfectly structured to integrate seamlessly with further upgrades, modules, and platform expansions.
“I like the simplicity of the steps and how easy it is made to understand all the different aspects of banking.”
— Feedback from Young Person, Week One
When an intricately complex backend logic engine functions so smoothly that the front-end user experience feels entirely simple, effortless, and fast. That is the signature of exceptional UX and engineering.
We are incredibly proud to have played a small part in supporting The Share Foundation’s vital mission. Knowing we have made it easier for young people to access and learn these imperative life lessons is immensely rewarding, and we are deeply grateful to the TSF team for their trust, collaboration, and the opportunity to build this together.
"A massive thank you to you all for the hard work and commitment you have given to the update of Stepladder Plus. You have all gone above and beyond, for this The Share Foundation are truly grateful."